Wednesday, September 16, 2009

In response to the recent dust-up over Joachim Schmid's book When Boredom StrikesI thought I'd mention Hans-Peter Feldmann's book Voyeur which has been released in a fourth edition by Walther Konig in Cologne.

Voyeur is approximately 250 pages of appropriated photos, some famous and some unknown, presented as a mass of images - a chaotic view of history and human existence. Each page, which may be illustrated with half a dozen images or more is a tangle of context. The blurring of history creates a surreal vision of society and the world that is both familiar and strange.

Movie stills, porn mags, photojournalism, advertising, amateur photos, art, and scientific images are recontextualized apart from their authors (no individual credit is given) and organized onto the page where hierarchy is left only to their sizing.

I have seen a third edition of this same book but the double page spreads are in a different order. The same photographs are presented but the sequence is different leading me to conclude that the content is dealt with by the author as a never-ending stream that can shift and change without altering the overall effect.

I find this book interesting for another reason - information overload. Partly due to its intentional small size and with the reproductions in all black and white the individual power of each image gives way to a general tenor of complacency. Photos of vast suffering sitting next to bright smiles somehow find a common denominator in this "world of paper."

In relation to Schmid, this work is a conceptual reordering of representation and authorship. Those whose knees were jerking to hang Schmid from his thumbs over copyright might find another artist to tar and feather here. Or maybe they would be satisfied by the fact that on the colophon page, Feldmann thanks "all the photographers whose pictures have been used for this work."

howdy.Jeff I would like to know when was the 1st published and also if you have an idea of the price between the 1st and 4th edition. also do you know where one could purchase this book?for me personally Feldmann and Ruff are in their own class. every time I look and contemplate their works I get a feeling that there's no use for me to take and make photographs. a positive feeling of "why bother?", but of course i continue to try as i can't think a better way to tell something about us.personally i wouldn't put Hans-Peter Feldmann and Joachim Schmid into same category as in the case of Schmid i get a feeling that he is more about playing visual games accompanied with explanatory text, than telling something profound about us and this world. even if the working methods are the same i don't consider the results to be in the same category or "class", but of course this is just my opinion.